An integrated platform design would seek to modulate conditions of appearance rather than attempting to script or contain what finally emerges. As discussed above, the urban street grid platform itself works this way as the urbanite calculates his own movements by the grid ’ s network. If the street grid were irregular and idiosyncratic, it would not mediate the maximal churn that it does. But now the rational programming of urbanist modernities and developer-driven postmodernities converges with software and hardware application programming interfaces and protocols with names like GeoRSS, GML, GPX, KML, EXIF, and OpenSearch Geo. As these cohere in and as the City layer of The Stack, our design concern should be with how a mixed interfacial regime could support a loquacious multiplication of outcomes impossible for either hard or soft systems alone. Some mixed platforms are already encoded into isomorphic software suites, some of which are the lattice on which designers might conjure and implement forms across multiple scales. The Stack ’ s layers arrange open and closed channels of access, manipulation, function, and irrelevance, and through these designers designate where to situate interfaces, speculate how to capitalize undervalued interactions to come, and, if they work on behalf of established Cloud platforms, extend and enforce the centripetal advantages of those particular services. Today some designers are trained to design for inside the glowing glass rectangle of the screen and some for the outside spaces in which screens are situated, but many of the most pressing opportunities of the City layer demand amphibiousness. For savvy urban designers, equally adept with physical and virtual envelopes, it ’ s not difficult to make up long lists of possible projects: augmented reality Apps for ambulance paramedics and open-air surgical theaters; a mash-up of post-Twitter microblog Apps linked to post-Siri voicecontrol interfaces and trans-Google translation software, together posting anything you want to say to anyone anywhere always; citizen activists using GIS, mass-market geobrowsers, and modified drones to streaming real-time C3 video to 3D-printed phones; mining composite crowd-sourced behavioral data to optimize the recycling of postpurchase prosaic junk; real-time flu outbreak visualization and private microgovernance of microbiopolitical swarms (a premium upgrade only for club members); traffic control sensor and smart tollbooth hacks; individually reconfigurable robotic building interiors collapsing rooms and even floors serving different programs in morning and at night; anonymized parking markets based on bitcoin and namecoin; building exteriors featuring networked cinema, not on thirty-second loops but on eighteen-month lunar cycles; lifelong syncing of car-phone-home- Clouds platform allegiance chosen at birth like football team fandom; Google Office per-minute commercial office leasing apps; personal RFID managers; rock star privacy consultants — all driven by (at least partially) open APIs enabling other applications to build further on their existing traces. Insert your own schemes and nightmares here.
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City Layer